1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method to prevent propagation of corrupted data packets and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method adding an additional sideband signal to all entries in queues that a data packet transfers through and precluding a corrupted data packet from being transmitted to outside devices when the additional sideband signal is clear.
2. Description of the Related Art
The HyperTransport (HT) technology was developed to provide a high-speed, high-performance point-to-point on-board link for interconnecting integrated circuits on a motherboard. The HT technology can be significantly faster than other bus technologies for an equivalent number of pins. The HT technology is designed to provide significantly more bandwidth than current technologies, to use low-latency responses, to provide low pin count, to be compatible with legacy computer buses, to be extensible to new system architecture buses, to be transparent to operating systems, and to offer little impact on peripheral drivers.
While the HT interface provides a high-speed chip-to-chip interface, data processing performed within the chips itself may often become the bottle neck. In existing serial interfaces, when a packet is sent across the interface, if an error exists in the packet, then there is a protocol built-in into the interface, which would direct that the packet be resent. The HT interface protocol does not implement such a resend feature. A method is needed that would prevent a corrupted packet from going through an integrated circuit and be transmitted to outside devices.